Flaring black hole launches up ultra-fast winds | new XRISM discovery

Leading X-ray space telescopes XRISM (JAXA-led mission) and XMM-Newton (ESA) have spotted a never-seen-before blast from a supermassive black hole. In a matter of hours, the gravitational monster whipped up powerful winds, flinging material out into space at eye-watering speeds of 60 000 km per second.

The gigantic black hole lurks within NGC 3783, a beautiful spiral galaxy imaged recently by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Astronomers spotted a bright X-ray flare erupt from the black hole before swiftly fading away. As it faded, fast winds emerged, raging at one-fifth of the speed of light.

Ehud Behar of our department was part of the international team of researchers that led to the detection, along with researches from around the world, including The Netherlands, Japan, USA, Spani and Italy . “Owing to its spectacular spectrometer,” says Ehud, “XRISM showed for the first time that just like the solar corona, magnetic flares in the black-hole corona eject winds, only they are 100 times faster, thus escaping the humongous gravitational pull of the black hole”.

Ehud has been researching black-hole winds for many years, specifically searching for their magnetic fingerprint. Ehud is part of the small Japanese XRISM science working group and draws gratification from finally discovering a solar-like coronal mass ejection from an active black hole.

For the article visit: https://arxiv.org/html/2512.08448v1

For the joint press release visit: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/XMM-Newton/Flaring_black_hole_whips_up_ultra-fast_winds

Image

Image Credit: ESA (Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO or ESA Standard Licence)

Artist’s impression of the flaring, windy black hole in NGC 3783. The swirling ‘doughnut’ of golden material is known as an accretion disc: a ring of material that is circling the black hole and will ultimately be devoured, pulled in closer and closer by the black hole’s colossal gravity. The bright spot marks a superheated region of material – a ‘hotspot’ that was seen to release first a looping X-ray flare, and then the intense ‘outflow’ of winds seen shooting to the top of the frame.